1. Field
The information disclosed relates to online advertising. More particularly, the information disclosed relates to estimating a probability that a candidate online advertisement will receive a click on a particular website.
2. Background Information
The marketing of products and services online over the Internet through advertisements is big business. In February 2008, the IAB Internet Advertising Revenue Report conducted by PricewaterhouseCoopers announced that PricewaterhouseCoopers anticipated the Internet advertising revenues for 2007 to exceed US$21 billion. With 2007 revenues increasing 25 percent over the previous 2006 revenue record of nearly US$16.9 billion, Internet advertising presently is experiencing unabated growth.
Unlike print and television advertisement that primarily seeks to reach a target audience, Internet advertising seeks to reach target individuals. The individuals need not be in a particular geographic location and Internet advertisers may elicit responses and receive instant responses from individuals. As a result, Internet advertising is a much more cost effective channel in which to advertise.
Contextual advertising is the task of displaying ads on webpages based on the content displayed to the user. Much of the contextual advertising market is based on a pay-per-click (PPC) model, where the advertiser pays the web publisher a fee every time a user clicks on an ad. The amount of revenue that a publisher collects per page view is a function of the click-through-rate (CTR) of each ad, along with the cost that the advertiser agrees to pay per click (note that this cost can itself be a function of various factors). Contextual advertising revenue is highly dependent on which ads the publisher chooses to display since CTR and cost-per-click can vary significantly from one ad to the next. Many publishers use commercial intermediaries known as ad networks to dynamically optimize the selection of ads for web pages based on various attributes of the page, ad, and user. The ad network space is composed of several large players (e.g., Yahoo!™, Microsoft™, and Google™), along with many smaller companies.
A goal is to display ads that are relevant to the user, in the context of the page, so that the user clicks on the ad thereby generating revenue for the webpage owner and the advertising network. Under a click model, advertising systems estimate a probability that a candidate-for-display advertisement will receive a click. While typical click model approaches have use when the candidate advertisement is for a webpage rich with words and phrases, they tend to be of limited use where ad relevance cannot easily be gleaned from the webpage text alone, such as for webpages that have limited or no content, or where the content is not product-related. There is a need to address these and other issues.